


Upon a Kiss

by illumynare



Category: Destiny (Video Game)
Genre: F/M, fireteam heartbreak, hello welcome to my garbage bin, sword logic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-21
Updated: 2016-11-21
Packaged: 2018-09-01 07:22:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,433
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8614891
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/illumynare/pseuds/illumynare
Summary: Several times that Eris touched darkness (one way or another).





	

Eris does not remember the first time she touched Toland's skin. Not because of the way the Pit eats through her mind, riddling it with cracks that stretch backwards into the past, crumbling away half of Omar's smiles and every word Sai ever spoke to her—

_(there was an afternoon in Old Russia, the air ice-cold but the sunlight honey-thick, where they met on patrol and fell into a laughing rhythm, calling their kill-counts back and forth across the ruined airfield; but Eris will lose that afternoon, she will cough it up with blood and spit and bile as she crawls through a cloud of Wizard smoke, and in the years that follow, she will think she did not meet Sai until Eriana gathered their fireteam)_

—but because it was such a little moment, and at the time, so meaningless.

This is the moment:

"This, uh, 'sword-logic.'" Omar makes air-quotes, more mocking than any eye-roll. "You really think Crota will follow its rules?"

"It's quint _essential_ to the Hive," Toland hisses—the way he spits his sibilants is one thing she _will_ remember—and his fingers cup and curve in a motion that Eris recognizes from Eriana.

She grabs his right hand, crushes and flattens the fingers before he can summon firebolt grenades to burn out Omar’s eyes.

"Eat your noodles," she says, and with a huff and a grumble of _plebeian simpletons,_ Toland returns to his dinner.

If Eris remembered that touch, she would remember being surprised that his palm was not damp like she expected; it was cool and smooth, but dry as a beetle-shell.

(Toland always remembers, but it is one of the many things that he never tells her.)

* * *

She does remember his hands being cold. She wishes she could forget the moment after she saw Omar bound and being eaten alive by the Hive—when she might have still, possibly, in her most desperate dreams rescued him—

_(and sometimes she does dream that moment differently, dreams that she charged the ranks of Hive, her knife cracking with furious Arc vengeance, that she cut them down and ripped the Heart of Crota open, broke Omar free and led him, limping, to the safety of the small, dark tunnels; that when she stole a Hive ship and hoped it could last the journey home, Omar laughed darkly beside her, and that at last they stood before the Vanguard together, twin stormcrows in the sunlight of the Tower)_

—but the moment will never leave her: when Toland drags her back into the darkness, cold hands wrapped over her mouth. Eris chokes against his palms, small blind noises of panic worming out of her throat, but she does not fight him. She knows what the Hive will do if they hear her, if they catch her.

Later, she is calm. She whispers to her Ghost how Omar died, and promises vengeance. As she finishes, Toland takes her wrist and slides a bond up her arm; it sticks just past her elbow.

"I'm not a Warlock," she says.

"It's made of Acolyte skin," he says.

"That's vile."

Eris does not know this is the last time she will reject using anything of the Darkness.

Toland huffs. "They'll believe you are one of their own. And that is the only way."

 _If you do not want to die like Omar,_ he does not need to say.

Eris traces the bond with her fingertips, feels its cold, hard ridges. It's a heavy, foreign thing on her arm. At the same time, Toland's cold fingertips drag across her face—but that touch, at least, is familiar.

The kiss that follows is warm. So too is the kiss after, and the one after that.

For a little while, she can believe that she once felt sunlight on her face.

* * *

There were a hundred moments like this in the Pit, and she cannot forget any of them: 

The Acolyte is alone, already confused by the song she has echoed off the walls. Perfect prey. When it sees her, it leans its head to one side and chitters, but does not attack.

Eris holds out a hand. Slowly, hoarsely, she forces another note of Wizard-song out of her throat.

The Acolyte trills in response, head lowering, and shuffles forward. As her song fades into harsh breaths, it nibbles gently at her hand, small cold teeth tickling at her skin but not drawing blood. Even though she is no longer singing, it smells the Wizard eyes that bleed endlessly on her face. It recognizes her as kin.

Eris shudders, tastes bile and the Wormspore that she choked down for her last meal—

_(the last time she slept, she dreamed that Toland was there in the darkness, Toland who is dead to Ir Yût, and he kissed her palms with a cold, wet mouth thatturned into a hundred mouths gnawing the flesh off her bones, and she woke gasping in silent panic)_

—and her knife drives through the soft underside of the Acolyte's throat. Cold, sticky blood spills across her hands.

Later, as she cracks off pieces of the Acolyte's exoskeleton and uses her teeth to scrape the stringy flesh from the underside, she wonders how well Toland would have liked this, if he had lived. If he would have found the sword-logic quite so beautiful, when it meant slavering over a piece of Hive chitin, the jagged edges cutting the sides of his mouth.

She laughs into the darkness, and wonders if she is quite mad when she hears him laughing back.

* * *

Eris has a thousand memories, a hundred thousand reasons for revenge. But Crota is dead and Oryx too. And Eris?

Is.

She _is,_ and sometimes she looks up at the light of the Traveller and her whole soul stutters, because what is she now? When the evils she forged herself to fight are gone, what is left of her?

"A simpleton's question," Toland growls from the corner of her bedroom by the window. "Existence is its own answer, how many times do I have to explain? _Look up at the sky._ "

The sky is full of the Traveller's light. It glimmers through Toland, because tonight he is translucent; the gulfs between them strain him more heavily than usual.

Eris still beckons, and Toland still comes to her, still takes her hand—

_(and her heart cracks, because there was a time when his hand was skin and muscle and bone, when she dreamed of leading him back to the Tower, of seeing his banishment lifted; and she can imagine still a world where he never heard Ir Yût, where hand-in-hand they spoke with Ikora, where side-by-side they exacted vengeance for Vell and Sai and Omar and Eriana and Wei-Ning, and there was never any night that Eris woke weeping and alone)_

_(but Eris is made of cracks and chasms, the void and the dark and the will between, and when you_ are _the dark shudder of breaking there is no way to break you)_

"Hush, love," she says, as her hand wraps around his.

Tendrils of dark smoke curl up from between her fingers. She doesn't know if, in this form, Toland can feel any pain. She doubts that he would care, and so she does not either.

Eris draws him down, settles his head in her lap.

"This is only a _temporary_ form," Toland huffs. "I assure you, I will find a manifestation—"

"More suited to your status?" Her fingers play across his face, send up little clouds of smoke and leave behind soot-edged trails of emptiness, through which her knees are visible.

It is cruel of her, perhaps. But whatever else Toland is to her, he is a creature of the Darkness now; and this is her greatest comfort, that of all the things that crawl in the Darkness, she is anathema to at least one of them.

"Savathûn has found me _very charming_."

"Indeed." She cups his ear, feels it melt away between her fingers. "Was this before or after you sideways-helped me kill Oryx?"

"After, of course. You know the love between those exalted siblings."

His eyes are still bright, though most of his face has faded away. He reaches up to her, traces the seam where Hive chitin meets what is left of her skin, and she shivers.

"It's a little like us, isn't it?" he says.

In answer, Eris lowers her head and presses her lips to his. Feels his mouth, and feels that old, heart-catching warmth, and feels it melt away.

"Yes," she says to the silent emptiness in her room.


End file.
